Legal and ethical implications of applications based on agreement technologies: the case of auction-based road intersections
This addresses the non-technical barriers for implementing agreement technologies in smart city infrastructure, though it is incremental as it builds on existing technological elements.
The paper tackles the problem of deploying auction-based road intersections in smart cities by analyzing their legal and ethical implications under international and Spanish regulations, resulting in a set of required technical and legal modifications for real-world application.
Agreement Technologies refer to a novel paradigm for the construction of distributed intelligent systems, where autonomous software agents negotiate to reach agreements on behalf of their human users. Smart Cities are a key application domain for Agreement Technologies. While several proofs of concept and prototypes exist, such systems are still far from ready for being deployed in the real-world. In this paper we focus on a novel method for managing elements of smart road infrastructures of the future, namely the case of auction-based road intersections. We show that, even though the key technological elements for such methods are already available, there are multiple non-technical issues that need to be tackled before they can be applied in practice. For this purpose, we analyse legal and ethical implications of auction-based road intersections in the context of international regulations and from the standpoint of the Spanish legislation. From this exercise, we extract a set of required modifications, of both technical and legal nature, which need to be addressed so as to pave the way for the potential real-world deployment of such systems in a future that may not be too far away.